WIP Wednesday – Planned Pooling

Planned pooling is something I’ve wanted to tackle for a long time! I’m finally getting the chance thanks to my friend Bambi and a bet I won. Bambi paid up in glorious fashion, with a skein of Wollmeise in colorway, Sultan! Thanks Bambi! Yarn collectors go nuts for this stuff and I can see why! The colors are lively and vivid, photos don’t do it justice!

But lets be honest, if the variegation is left to it’s own devices, the end result is a truly horrible mess. Planned pooling, on the other hand, showcases this yarn in all it’s glory! And this yarn is dyed in the just the right way that the color sequence can be laid back on itself with each new row, stacking the color into columns!

After deciding that this yarn would indeed work for stacked pooling, I fiddled around with swatches and decided my magic number is 48. The magic number is the number of stitches required to use exactly one repeat of color per row. The rest is conceptually simple and with a little practice, it’s easy to execute! Cast on your magic number and knit away, using one full color repeat on each row, the colors should line up, red on red, blue on blue, all the way down and back again too! I practiced a bunch in plain old garter stitch, just to get a feel for it. It came easy with a bit of practice, just modulate the tension a bit if things aren’t stacking exact. It becomes second nature as you watch the colors slip through your fingers and match up!

Ultimately I decided on the One Row Lace Scarf. I think the lace provides a bit of wiggle room with the way the colors stack. Once I got started, it’s been smooth sailing! I can tell already, this is going to be a great travel project! It’s certainly not going to languish at the bottom of the queue anymore!